The present invention relates to an automatic processing apparatus comprising a bank note validator such as a cash dispenser or an automatic teller machine installed for various processes such as deposit and disbursement depending on user's manipulation in a financial institution and particularly to an automatic processing apparatus and bank note validating method which have improved security by executing the money validation process in the host computer side.
An automatic processing apparatus used in a financial institution has been constituted of various units such as a bank note deposit/disbursement unit for receiving or transferring bank note to or from a customer, a validating unit for validating bank note deposited and a bank note stacking unit. Among these units, the bank note transfer paths and gates for determining the transfer path for the bank note are provided. The validating unit which is one of these units is provided to discriminate the denomination of bank note deposited and also determine the true or false bank note. The validating unit is constituted of a sensor unit for detecting various features of the bank note, a memory unit for storing the feature data obtained from the sensor unit and a validation processing unit for validating the denomination of bank note from its feature data. These units are all provided within the automatic processing apparatus.
As explained above, since the automatic processing apparatus of the related art is provided with the validation processing unit for determining the denomination of bank note in its inside and therefore results in various problems that (a) if the apparatus is stolen, the validator that is the secret matter for discrimination is made public, (b) it is required to modify the validation processing unit, if the features of bank note are changed or if a measure for various kinds of bank note of respective countries is added, but such modification must be made for each automatic processing apparatus, and (c) since the validation processing unit is mounted to each automatic processing unit, memories for data storing and working are required, resulting in rise of manufacturing cost.
The official gazette, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application NO. 2000-348234 discloses the technique in which the rough true/false discrimination process is executed in the automatic processing apparatus as the initial stage of discrimination and detail true/false discrimination process is executed in the host computer. However, even in this prior art, the modification work of each apparatus and the memory for storing data for rough true/false discrimination are still required, if the feature data of bank note is changed.